Workfree Wandering

I didn’t wake up one day and decide, “Right, time for an Ultimate.”
That decision has been brewing for decades—shaped by old Volkswagens, a hand-me-down caravan, and a stubborn belief that if you’ve got the basics sorted, you can go anywhere.

The Kombi years – chasing freedom and a soulmate

My education started with three Kombis.

One of them, Dad and I literally cut the roof out of and fitted a secondhand pop-top. Backyard engineering at its finest. No manuals, no YouTube, just a confident “yeah, that’ll work.” I still remember driving through the Breakfast Creek drive-through before the roof went back on—my mate Thomo standing up through the open roof, poking his head out and asking for a carton like it was the most normal thing in the world. Absolute chaos. Good times.

Those Kombis taught me a simple truth: you don’t need much to travel well.
You need:

• Water – so you’re not planning your day around taps.
• A fridge – so the food’s cold and the white wine was colder (back in the day – now’s it red).
• A bed – so you actually rest, not just “get through the night”.
• A cooker – so you can turn a carpark or a beach pull-in into a kitchen.

With the Kombis, I could fix, improve, and maintain all of that myself. They were rough around the edges, but they were mine. I loved those vans—not just for where they took me, but for what they represented. Back then, the travel was as much about trying to find my soulmate as it was about finding new places.

The HiAce – keeping a young family moving

Then life shifted. Kids arrived. Priorities changed—but the itch to travel didn’t.

We lashed out and bought a secondhand HiAce campervan. Compared to the Kombis, it felt almost fancy—some extra mod cons, a bit more comfort, but still built around the same core: water, fridge, bed, cooker.

The key thing? I could still tweak it. I could still make it better.
That mattered. Because travel, for us, wasn’t a once-a-year event. It was how we stayed sane, how we stayed connected as a very young family. The HiAce let us keep moving, even when life was full and noisy and sleep-deprived.

I loved that van because it proved something important: you don’t have to stop travelling when kids come along—you just have to adapt the setup.

The Olympic – a home for growing up

Somewhere in that season, I borrowed Dad’s Olympic caravan. The idea was simple: give the family a “home away from home” for those two to four weeks over Christmas.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also borrowing a blank canvas.

The Olympic became the place where my “let’s make it better” instincts really took off. There was always something to improve, refine, or re-think. Storage, comfort, little systems that made life easier. Every trip, I’d come home with a mental list of tweaks.

That van gave us around twenty years of memories—our kids slowly turning from children into adults, all against a backdrop of canvas, fibreglass, and the kind of basic comforts that make long stays feel effortless.

I loved the Olympic because it wasn’t just a van. It was a stage for our family growing up.

The pattern I can’t ignore

Looking back now, there’s a clear theme running through all of it:

• The Kombis were about me—freedom, possibility, and trying to find my soulmate.
• The HiAce was about keeping a young family on the move without losing ourselves.
• The Olympic was about giving our kids a place to grow, with enough comfort to stay longer and go further.

And underneath all of that, the same foundations kept showing up:
water, fridge, bed, cooker—wrapped in something I could understand, maintain, and improve. Canvas, fibreglass, and “upmarket basics” that never tried to be more complicated than they needed to be.

Why this next chapter matters so much

Now we’re back (nearly) to just the two of us again—me and Shelly.
But this time, we want the options open.

We still want the basics and the comfort. We still want something I can understand and trust. But we also want flexibility: the ability to roam far, stay longer, and maybe, just maybe, borrow a grandchild or two for a short burst of adventure.

That’s the headspace we were in when we started seriously asking:

“Okay, so what’s the right setup for this next chapter?”

And that’s where the Ultimate comes into the story.

But that’s a tale for the next post.